Tag: Ponzi scheme

Outside the bubble

When you are inside, you are hard-presed and unable to think.

But when you are out of the bubble, it’s illuminating.

You are able to look back, to gain perspectives.

Bubble by definition is that which encompasses those who subscribe to its rules (deposit here, withdraw there).

We got the Tulip mania in Holland, Ponzi scheme in Florida, dot.con and most recently, housing.

In fact, more are in the making (student loan, green tech etc…).

High stakes and high rewards.

But then, who would want to jump in to that which has already been proven 100%.

There is always “acceptable loss” “sot and hard trend”.

But what is acceptable to one is not acceptable to the other.

So we could never really be outside of a bubble.

We are inter-linked with others: friends, families, and co-workers.

They will be the ones who whisper “it’s just between you and me”.

Few  were able to foresee this past housing crisis.

Now we all are on this side of it, with some residues and long tail effects.

What lessons learned? Take-aways?

Are we wiser while poorer?

A friend’s Dad has just passed away.

At my last visit, his words were “let me sleep a little bit”.

The drug had taken its effect.

When we are in a bubble, perhaps we “sleep a little bit”.

Why think?

Social proof ( the majority are always right).

So we let down our guards, exercise not our survival instincts.

We forgot to fight, the way gladiators used to each day.

Our sense of “flight or fight” has been put to sleep.

After all, it’s the bank, the rating agencies, the press.

All well-regarded institutions, with huge marble lobbies and high ceilings.

I heard of more lay-offs (Motorola under Google, Newsweek gone under for the second time etc..).

Not a  good sign!

To shake all off, takes some time.

Just like healing and grief process, maybe all we need is time.

The bubble crushed dreams. Just like Fukushima and earthquake.

We just don’t see it in that “disastrous” light, but its tolls are the same, if not deeper.

When we recover from a bubble, we lost that which made us successful in the first place: self-confidence.

To restore that takes baby steps.

One small win at a time.

But those baby steps are outside the bubble, not huge strides we made inside.

What an irony. Should have been the other way around. In hindsight!

But with each baby step, the strength will come back, for the long journey ahead.

Watch out for another bubble on the horizon. No risks no rewards.

Unseen hands

that manipulate interest rates, oil price, appropriate and earmark budgets for the commons.

Adam Smith must be talking about the abstract “invisible hand” of a free market, while in reality, we all feel there are levers behind the scene with successive hands, tinkling and adjusting. Some are automated, by self-improving algorithms.

One example of the devastating works of this unseen hand was seven or eight years ago, when people in Southern California driving to Arizona and Las Vegas to buy houses. People who were NINJ (No job, no income).

The unseen hand that was supposed to regulate, didn’t.

Now, they uncover a bunch of Ponzi schemes. Quickly, these poster boys are put away, or at least, taken out of their nice homes in Colorado.

I do buy things to sustain. Hence, I am a consumer, but refuse to be called consumerist. I don’t follow the cult of purchase for purchase’s sakes.

I don’t buy to stimulate anything. If the economy can’t get cranked by itself (with 7 Billion of us buying things day in and out), then all the unseen hands in the world can’t help it.

At least, there is some good news from the Michigan Consumer Confidence Index. And Wall Street chart starts looks like a slanted V-shaped recovery. Let’s hope so. Rally, rally, rally. Oil price goes up. Confidence is up. So is the temperature.

If you don’t hit the store by 10AM, forget it. The USA weather maps shows red-hot regions in the South. It’s global warming. And we need those unseen hands to regulate the thermostat as well. I am not against hands. Just encourage them to tinkle with the right buttons, while letting the market regulate itself, in the noble Adam Smith tradition.

BYOD

The Economist Christmas Special was about America, a Ponzi scheme that works.

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15108634&source=hptextfeature

It projects 1 Billion Americans by 2100.

With its many niches, America seems to offer a bit of everything, for everybody: hunting, boozing, gambling, church-going and freedom to protest.

I remember my first Christmas, living humbly in a cold basement. But I created my version of America by inviting Vietnamese Students at Penn State to come over for a party, albeit makeshift. We dimmed out the lights and had a disco party (mid-70’s).

My America.

No eggnog, fruit cake or tinsel. Just foreign students away from home, sharing a common bond of humanity and most pressingly, in need of  heat (it was cold in Winter 76).

People who wouldn’t otherwise have been friends: a hippie guy with hair down to his knees, a short guy majoring in Agronomy and a French-major gal with a condescending air about her.  Yet, they came, at my invitation. First Christmas in America was our common denominator. It could have been a Roger Altman‘s movie: post-card X-mas outside, Saigon-like inside.

With sweaters over shiny shirts, every guy in the room had hair down to his neck.

Winter in cold Pennsylvania. Stores were closed and foreign students had no place to go.

With plenty of snow outside (by then, our early fascination with the white stuff had been melted away), and over hot chocolate, I remember quoting Shakespeare, that “life is just a stage, and we are here to play out our role -“.

We were joined by a throng of immigrants, before and after us, to becoming American.

The language and culture part came later (naturalized).

The lingering part was hard: neither here nor there.

(like the shopper gauging which cashier to line up behind just to end up in the longest line).

Back then, we couldn’t use the phone, since it was very expensive if possible at all.

Some people even had their calls patched through Canada. Now, even the I-phone got de-commoditized via I phone 5c.

To me, it was a one-way journey (25 years later, I found I had been wrong then).

Whatever America has to offer:  from McCafe to McAfee, Morse code to Moore’s Law, it wasn’t without a price :”ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”.

And church services would close with “who among you would stand up and give your life for the mission”, F/T or P/T”

(silence, organ music, and peer pressure to solicit your time or donation to the cause).

The Ponzi scheme that works. More will join us here in America, and it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy: your wish will come through, because America is not a place. It’s a platform, where you can launch your dream. America is Cape Canaveral, a dream launching pad. Be prepared and fasten your seat belt, It’s not a walk in the park.

By the time you land, you will wonder where the heck you have been, and most of all, who you have become.

American? That’s the answer from German, Italian, Irish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Serbian, Somalian and soon Syrian, who have arrived and bought into the scheme. BYOD (Bring your own dream), the sign says at the door. Not “Welcome to America.”  The Native Americans perhaps never put any sign up in the first place. The best you can get for free here is workplace frozen turkey (pre-recession years).

And that takes some cooking. And with that kind of party, I would put BYOB in the invitation, just to make it clear: it’s a potluck dinner, because, Ponzi, by definition, manufactures nothing except for a dream of getting rich, but never something for nothing. Buy now, pay later (either by us or our descendants, but pay we will).  It has worked so far.

But we need more MLM recruits for it to work. The new sign will have to say “BYOD”, bring as many dreams as you’d like, but no preexisting condition preferred.